1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to confectionery dispensing devices and more particularly to portable dispensers for generally spherical confectioneries such as gumballs and jawbreaker candies.
2. Background Art
Confectioneries, particularly candy and gum, have long been popular with children and adults alike. Dispensers of individual pieces or small quantities of confectioneries are particularly popular with children. Numerous of such devices exist in which a coin must be inserted for the device to dispense a piece of candy or gum. Indeed, a popular form of savings banks for children are gumball dispensers which require the child to deposit a coin before being able to obtain a gumball. Many devices for dispensing confectioneries, while portable in the sense that they may be moved from one location to another, are not readably carried upon the person of the user. There have, however, been portable, handheld devices for the dispensing of individual flat, generally rectangular solid, pieces of candy. Examples of such candy dispensers in which the upper portion of a handheld dispenser is manipulated to eject a piece of candy from adjacent the top of a magazine containing a number of upwardly spring biased pieces are shown in Uxa U.S. Pat. No. 2,620,061 issued Dec. 2, 1952; Uxa U.S. Pat. No. 2,853,206 issued Sep. 23, 1958; Haas U.S. Pat. No. 3,410,455 issued Nov. 12, 1968; Hinterreiter U.S. Pat. No. 3,565,284 issued Feb. 23, 1971; Haas U.S. Pat. No. 3,942,683 issued Mar. 9, 1976; Haas U.S. Pat. No. 4,295,579 issued Oct. 20, 1981 and Haas U.S. Pat. No. 4,966,305 issued Oct. 30, 1990. Such devices require manipulation of the top of the dispenser by the user's hand holding the dispenser or a finger or the thumb of the other hand. Haas U.S. Pat. No. 3,263,860 issued Aug. 2, 1966 discloses another type of dispenser for such flat pieces of candy carried in a rearwardly angled hopper for ejection through an opening adjacent the bottom of the hopper. Ejection is accomplished by a mechanism carried in a base atop which the hopper is mounted. The ejection mechanism is a spring biased linkage that operates upon depression by the user of a bar that is exposed through the top of the base adjacent the hopper opening to move a pair of ejector arms through openings in the back of the hopper to push a single piece of the flat candy out the opening. In addition to requiring a base that is large relative to the piece of candy being dispensed in order to house the ejector linkage, this prior art dispenser would be difficult to use with generally spherical confectioneries as they would tend to roll out the opening at the bottom of the hopper even prior to a user actuating the ejector linkage. Accordingly, there remains a need for a portable, handheld dispenser of generally spherical confectioneries such as gumballs and jawbreaker candies which may be readably carried upon the person of the user and readily actuated in any number of ways to dispense a single piece of a generally spherical confectionery without requiring any particular proficient digital dexterity.